Bret Baier And Shannon Bream Help Trump And GOP Blame Democrats For Government Shutdown

Bret Baier and Shannon Bream, two supposedly objective Fox anchors, were live after midnight to discuss the federal government shutdown. Their first order of business was to blame the Democrats, portray the Trump administration as paragons of public concern in its handling of the shutdown and, as a bonus, Baier and Bream helped validate Trump’s conspiracy theory that the Democrats deliberately shutdown the government in order to sabotage his magnificent tax cuts.

After some reporting on the shutdown, Bream, who was anchoring the show, introduced Baier to cover what she called the beginning of “the blame game.” This is how the two slyly played that game:

BAIER: You talk about the blame game, Shannon. And just to give you a flavor of where this may have gone wrong for Democrats, the Associated Press, the story that is on the line now, says “Senate Democrats Derail Bill To Avert Shutdown.” Now, that’s the headline of the AP story! “Senate Democrats Derail Bill To Avert Shutdown.”

That gives you a sense that the blame game, however it’s being portrayed, is going to be a little tougher for Democrats because they had that bill in front of them …

BREAM: Yeah, and this administration is trying to be very careful, because they do control House, Senate and White House, to make this as painless as they possibly can for the public.That’s going to factor in as well, too, because people aren’t going to be showing up and being denied services in a lot of important places. Social Security checks always go out. All those important things continue to happen. But they’re not going to put the public face on it like we saw back in 2013 with the Obama administration, when it was a more adversarial government.

BAIER: They’re going to go out of their way and they’re also going to go out of their way – while they have the majority in the Senate, they’ll say they don’t control it ‘cause they don’t have 60 votes. And you may hear the president weigh in on that.

Then, having absolved Trump and the Republicans of responsibility for the shutdown and portraying the Trump administration as the most thoughtful, most considerate of shutdown stewards, Baier set about validating Trump’s ridiculous conspiracy theory:

BAIER: Earlier tonight, [White House Press Secretary] Sarah Sanders tweeted, “Democrats can’t shut down the booming Trump economy. Are they now so desperate they’ll shut down the government instead?” And you heard this from the president too, that he thinks that the tax cuts and the success of the tax cuts, is part of the reason that you get into the shutdown. He may have a point if the shutdown goes for some time. For example, at the IRS, almost 56% of IRS employees would be sent home as not essential. Now, this is an IRS that is trying to transition to the new tax law, that is going to be bombarded by questions from taxpayers around the country. So tax filing season starts in less than two weeks. If the shutdown continues for several days, it becomes an issue on the tax front.

BREAM: And to people’s real lives and trying to get answers and move forward.

Watch the propaganda disguised as news analysis below, from Fox News @ Night’s coverage of the 2018 government shutdown.